What hands should you play in poker? 40 from early position, 89 on the button

Every beginner asks the same question in the same wrong shape. Is king-jack a good hand? Is ace-seven playable? Should I call with suited connectors?

None of those questions can be answered, because a hand is not good or bad on its own. It is good or bad in a seat. Ace-seven suited is a clear open from the button and a clear fold from the first seat, and it is the same two cards either time. Until you attach a position to the question there is nothing to answer.

So here is the answer in the shape that works, taken from the solver ranges published on this site for 6-max cash at 100 big blinds. Real frequencies, not opinions, and the lists at the end are exact.

How many hands should you play?

Start with the size of the problem. This is how often the solver opens the pot when everyone before has folded:

Read the second column again. From the first seat you fold more than four hands out of five. Folding is not something that happens when your cards are bad; folding is the game, and the hands you play are the exception.

Read the fourth column too. The button plays more than twice as many hands as the first seat — 89 against 40. That gap is the entire practical value of position, expressed as a number. Nothing about the cards changed between those two rows.

The most expensive habit in beginner poker

Almost every new player converges on the same rule: play any ace. It feels disciplined, because you are folding most hands. It is the single most costly habit at low stakes, and the arithmetic shows why in a way that arguing about it never will.

Deal out every possible starting hand and count. "Any ace" is 14.9% of the hands you are dealt. The solver's opening range from the first seat is 17.2%. Those are almost the same number. You are not playing too many hands.

You are playing the wrong ones. Of your 14.9%, the hands the solver does not open from that seat at all are:

A2o, A3o, A4o, A5o, A6o, A7o, A8o, A9o and A2s.

That is 100 of the 1,326 possible starting hands, or 7.5% of everything you are dealt — roughly half your "any ace" range, played from a seat where it is never opened. And because your hand quota is full of those, you are also folding the 9.9% the solver does open instead: the middle pairs, the suited kings, king-queen, queen-jack suited, the suited connectors.

So the rule is wrong twice over. It adds hands that should be folded and crowds out hands that should be raised, while producing a hand count that looks about right. That is why it survives so long: the symptom a player would notice — playing too many pots — is absent.

The trouble with a weak offsuit ace is not that it never wins. It is that it wins small pots and loses big ones. When you flop an ace with a seven kicker and someone raises you, you are either beaten by a better ace or folding out a worse hand. You have made top pair and inherited a guessing game.

The 40 hands to open from the first seat

Here is the whole early-position range, exactly, in standard notation:

55+ · A3s+ · ATo+ · K8s+ · KJo+ · Q9s+ · J9s+ · T9s · 65s · 54s

Read that as: every pair from fives up; every suited ace from ace-three up; ace-ten offsuit and better; king-eight suited and better; king-jack and king-queen offsuit; queen-nine suited and better; jack-nine and jack-ten suited; and three suited connectors.

Forty hands. If you learn one thing from this page, learn this list, because the other seats are built on top of it.

Notice what is missing. No weak offsuit aces. No offsuit queens or jacks at all — queen-jack offsuit is a fold from the first seat. No king-ten offsuit. Those four absences cover most of the hands beginners lose money with from early position.

What each seat adds

Move one seat later and the range does not change character — it simply grows. Each row below is what that seat adds to everything above it:

Two things in that table are worth more than the rest of it.

The button is where the jump happens. Twenty-seven new hands arrive at once — more than the previous two seats combined. Every one of them is playable only because you will act last on every street that follows. If you take one habit away from this article, make it that the button is the seat to loosen in, and the first seat is the seat to be boring in.

Weak offsuit aces do eventually appear — on the button, five seats later than most players start opening them. A4o through A7o show up in that button row. They were never unplayable cards; they were unplayable there.

Suited matters more than a high card

Break the early-position range down by type and the shape is clear: it is 43% suited hands, 31% offsuit, 27% pairs. Suited hands are 23.5% of what you are dealt but nearly half of what you open from the first seat.

The button makes the point even harder. It opens queen-two suited — a two is the worst kicker there is — while the first seat will not open queen-nine offsuit. Seven ranks of kicker, and the suited hand is the one that gets played.

The reason is what each hand does after the flop. Queen-nine offsuit makes one pair and then has to guess. Queen-two suited makes flushes, and flushes get paid. Beginners rank hands by how strong they look at the moment they are dealt; solvers rank them by what they can become.

A practical version of that: when you are unsure about a marginal hand, suitedness is worth more than a rank or two of kicker. If you are choosing between playing king-nine offsuit and king-six suited from late position, the solver takes the suited one.

What to do with this tonight

• Memorise the 40. 55+, A3s+, ATo+, K8s+, KJo+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s, 65s, 54s. That is your range from the first two seats, and it will not embarrass you from any seat.
• Stop opening weak offsuit aces from early position. This one change removes 7.5% of your hands and almost none of your winnings.
• Loosen on the button, not before it. Twenty-seven extra hands become correct there and nowhere earlier.
• When a marginal hand is close, take the suited one.
• Raise or fold. Every hand in every range above is a raise. Limping is not on the list at any seat.

The full ranges, with the exact frequency for every hand from every seat, are on the opening ranges pages, and every one of the 169 starting hands has its own page showing how often it is opened from each position. Both are free and need no account.

Where these numbers do not apply

Three honest caveats, because a starting-hand chart used in the wrong spot is worse than none.

This is for an unopened pot. Every range above assumes everyone before you folded. If someone has already raised, you are answering a different question entirely, and the answer is on the blind defense and facing-a-raise pages.

This is 100 big blinds. Short stacks play differently, and below roughly 15 big blinds the whole question collapses into jam-or-fold. The push/fold charts cover that, by stack depth and seat.

This is cash, not tournaments. Tournament ranges are tighter in the places where busting costs you prize money and wider where there are blinds worth stealing. The first-in tournament ranges from 10 to 20 big blinds are on the ranges pages alongside the cash ones.

One more, on precision: the lists above are hands opened at least half the time. Solvers mix, so a handful of hands sit at 20% or 60% rather than always or never — the per-hand pages show the exact frequency if you want it. Rounding a mixed hand to "play it" or "fold it" costs almost nothing at this level, and trying to mix by feel costs more than it saves.

Method: frequencies are combo-weighted over all 1,326 starting hands (six combinations per pair, four per suited hand, twelve per offsuit hand) from this site's 6-max cash solver ranges at 100 big blinds, and the weights sum to 1,326 exactly. Hand lists are those opened at a frequency of 0.5 or higher; the "hands it plays" column counts those. "Any ace" is 198 combinations, 14.9% of all starting hands; of the lojack's 17.2%, ace-high hands are 7.3 points and everything else 9.9. The notation given for the 40-hand range was expanded and diffed against the stored chart: it matches exactly, with no hand in one and not the other.